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Reverend Williams (Continuum-59343921)
Williams was the adopted father of Jeddah Overview One day Williams met a young Japanese girl who had come to America with her husband, mother, uncles and aunts, only to fall prey to town prejudice in one of the outlying settlements that had supposedly been their Christian refuge away from the persecutions of the Japanese system. She was the lone survivor of their party, which had been raided by some malevolent force that at first glance he had taken to be a band of renegade natives. The girl herself, however, told a different story entirely, of how a single creature had been responsible for the slaughter of her family and her own distressed condition. She told about the "red-eyed demon" who had come to them seemingly as a friendly guest and had stayed the night sharing food and victuals, only to reveal himself in the dead of night as nothing less than a fiend from the very pits, a carnal being who had singled out the young virgin in their midst as his intended prey. Though he was not well versed in matters of the occult, Williams was familiar with the legends of the Incubus, a form of demon who preyed upon women the way a vampire would such the blood from its victims. An Incubus sought human women to mate with, and a lone and pretty girl was easy prey to his carnal lusts, though this Incubus claimed to be an immortal being who was revered as a God in his realm, who only came to Earth on certain nights to claim a mate with whom he had hoped to bear offspring. When her parents and family objected the demon had slain them without a second thought or a shred of mercy. On this occasion the mating proved to be successful and the girl was with child, but so great was the shame of her ordeal that she wanted nothing less than to end her life and begged the Reverend to assist her in this endeavor. It was with great fortitude and compassion that Williams had prevailed upon the girl to abide until her son was born, after which she grew pale and sickly and for all the assistance a doctor could render she did not last a month past childbirth. Williams was therefore left with a half-breed Japanese boy of unknown parentage (at the time he had not been able to credit the thought of an actual demon impregnating a child since only God could create life, and why inflict an innocent woman with such a burden?) and so he resolved to raise the boy as his own in spite of their racial differences, a tremendous act of compassion and good faith for those troubled times when racism against Asians was a nearly universal social condition. But as the boy grew older and started to manifest his unusual "talents" the reverend had grown fearful that he may well have aided and abetted in the birthing of the Anti-Christ. He therefore prevailed upon the lad to learn the ways of the Lord so that he might escape the temptations of his demonic pedigree. The boy proved to be a model son and an obedient child who could make any father proud...but every so often his demonic origins would show through in some tell-tale sign or unintentional manner, and Williams would feel the fear returning, even as he grew to be envious of the lad for his smooth-talking ways and healing arts, to say nothing of the boy's uncanny way of knowing things without having to be told them. Reverend Williams could justify a little trickery in the name of Jesus, had even resorted to cheap carnival tricks and slight-of-hand gestures to beguile the sheep who became his flock in the old days, but presented with an obvious example of miraculous powers that could not be explained by reason or science...his fears drove him to drinking, and then to drugs, hoping to ease the strain of having to shepherd a "Demonspawn" onto the path of the Angels. In time Williams had grown to both love and loathe the boy, beseeching God to take this burden away from his shoulders, or to explain why a youth such as him had been so blessed with divine favor while Williams---a noble man of the cloth---had not been so favored and could not so much as lay hands upon the crippled, weak and afflicted. Fear turned to resentment, resentment to hostility, and hostility to hate, though he tried always to mask these dark emotions behind a stern and uncompromising visage. Until one day he found by Jeddah just as he was coming back to their tent from a visit to the city looking drunk as a sailor and clearly suffering the effects of some sort of narcotic, which Jebediah deduced to be that new wonder drug, Cocaine. In the heat of the moment, his tongue loosened by the combination of booze and drugs, Williams proceeded to outline to his young ward a horrifying tale about Jebediah's supposed birth and actual pedigree. Until that moment his supposed "son" had never suspected his "father's" true feelings, but provoked to rage Williams let it all spill out, and displayed a shocking vocabulary utterly unworthy of a man of God. Jebediah was taken aback, and then, very slowly, he started to get ANGRY... Jebediah, upon hearing his mentor denounce his nominal pupil, turned the fires of his righteous wrath upon the good Reverend Williams, faulting the man for every tiny little detail that the boy had ever noticed or wondered about his father, and then going on to call the man a hypocrite and a coward whose faith was lacking and who preached falsehoods while pretending to be holy. Something dark and imposing rose up in him that black day, transforming the boy into the very "Old Testament" prophet that Williams had only pretended to be, and for once the boy's full charismatic power manifested and overwhelmed the hapless preacher. The force of the young man's personality alone was enough to break the old man's frail heart, but to be denounced by his very capable apprentice was an ego-shock from which the reverend could not hope to recover, and though Jebediah never laid so much as a hand upon his alleged father it was as if he had reached into the man's chest and crushed his cardiac organ as easily as another man might have squeezed a grape between his fingers. Williams fell back and lay dead with a look of abject horror on his face, his eyes staring vacantly into infinity as the shocked young man attempted to revive him, to no avail as it seemed for once that his healing powers had utterly failed him. It would not be until many hours later that very morning that the other carnival folk would find the two of them in their wagon with the young man cradling his dead father in his lap and keening like a lost soul who had lost his will to live altogether. Category:Continuum-59343921